A lot of us rely heavily on email throughout each and every day. I know I am constantly checking mine and always making sure to respond in a timely manner. One thing about email that I always wish was more customizable was my signature. I know that you can customize it, but I have always wanted an easier way to do this.
Then an iPhone app called Signatures came along a little while back and it intrigued me because it gave you the capability to create your own signature right on your iPhone. Once I saw the app, I knew I had to try it out and see if it could actually help me solve my problem of customizing my email signature. Did it? Let’s find out after the break.
Adding Content
When you first open up Signatures, you are going to want to fill out some details about yourself. You can choose to add as much or as little as you want, it really all depends on what you are comfortable with people seeing. There are five different categories that you can fill out and add to your signature.
Signatures' Homepage (left) Adding Content (right)
The first one is called Contact Details and this is where you fill out all of the personal information about yourself, your name, address, phone number, etc. Secondly, you can put in a digital signature by actually signing your name on the iPhone like you would a letter. If you don’t like signing your name on the small screen, you can also scan in your signature and import to the app as well.
Filling out your personal information and digital signature
Next, you can add your social networks and instant messaging services to your customized signature. The app provides you with a good amount of services to connect to and to be honest, a handful of them are really not necessary, in my opinion. Then lastly, you have the option of adding a note which can be used for those of you that like to write famous quotes on your signature or something to that effect.
List of social networks and instant messaging apps to connect to
Creating Your Signature
When you first start to build your signature card, you are given two options to either create a custom one or using a template that is provided. When you choose to create your own, you basically select what information you want people to see based upon what you filled in earlier. This is a great option if you want something simple, but if you want to spice it up a little, you are going to want to go with using one of the templates.
Creating a New Signature
There are ten different types of templates that are broken up into four different categories (General, Social, Basic, and Work) for you to choose from. Each one has it’s own subtle differences and they are all really clean looking templates to use. Depending on the one you choose will decide what information you need to show.
Templates for your signature
Using Your Signature
Once you are done tinkering and creating your own template, you can now use it for your emails. Signatures has an option where you can create an email from within the app with your new template. It uses your address book so you don’t have to necessarily remember who you need to email, you can just look them up. You can also copy your template and paste it into another email application that you may be using, like Sparrow or the Mail app for example.
Creating an email with your customized signature
Thoughts
I am still undecided if I really like this app or not because although it fills a need, there are some limitations to it. For one, you are limited to using it just on your iPhone, which for some people may be okay, but I would like to use it when I sending email on my computer or iPad as well. Secondly, although the templates I create look really good on the app, when I use them in an email, they don’t look as good. For example, for one of the templates I used a picture of myself, but when I tried to use it in an email, it wouldn’t work.
Outside of these limitations, I really like the design of Signatures and how easy they make it to create your own template. I think it can be useful for people that tend to use their iPhone a lot for email on the go, but I am not sure that the masses will use this on a regular basis. The app itself costs $2.99, which is an okay price. Unfortunately, Signatures has left me wanting more; they have a good foundation for an app and if they could fix some things I think there might be great promise for it.
Would you use something like this? If not, do you have any other recommendations for an app that is similar to this?